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\noindent \textbf{\Large{Tao Liu}} \hfill \Letter \texttt{liu3tao@gmail.com}\\
255 Snowhaven Ct Apt 12, Merced, CA 95348, USA \hfill \Telefon (209) 201-5447 


\vspace*{2em}

%\noindent
%Dear Recruiting Officer:
%\\
%During more than 5 years of graduate study, I have accumulated extensive
%experience in software development on several embedded hardware
%platforms with C or C-like languages in different operation systems. I
%have hands-on experience on many aspects of low-power sensor network
%systems, including sensing, data storage, and radio communication with
%an emphasis on low-power wireless link quality estimation. Please see
%the attached list of research projects I have participated in for more
%details.

%\item \emph{Experiences with power line communication}

%    I am knowledgeable about the fundamentals of power line
%    communication from my undergraduate courses (Power System
%    Communications, Signals and Systems). Although I do not have much
%    practical experience with today's power line communication systems,
%    I believe my strong knowledge in low-power networking and education
%    background in power systems will help me grasp the principles of
%    modern power line communication technologies in a short period of
%    time.




%\item \emph{Understanding of Internet protocols}

%    I have strong background in networking and practical experience with
%    many of the protocols in the Internet protocol suit as well as
%    wireless communication protocols. My courses in the graduate study
%    cover many common Internet protocols, such as IP, ICMP, IPsec, TCP,
%    UDP, DHCP, DNS, FTP, HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, SSH, Telnet, TLS/SSL, NTP,
%    SOAP, etc. In addition, many of my research projects are related to
%    mobile wireless communication in general, therefore I am also
%    familiar with wireless communication standards such as 802.11,
%    802.15.4, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, etc. Please see the attached project list
%    for more details. 

%\item \emph{Ability to come up to speed quickly on new networking technology}

%As a part of my graduate research, I need to constantly update my
%knowledge to the state-of-art research in the fast expanding area of
%low-power wireless communication and novel applications of networked
%resource constrained devices. I believe my interests in networking and
%strong educational background will help me adopt to any new, emerging
%networking technologies quickly.

%\item \emph{Experience with TinyOS or similar embedded operating systems a plus}

%    As answered previously, most of my research is done in TinyOS, so
%    with more than 5 years of experience, I am highly proficient with
%    software develop in TinyOS now. I also have some experience with
%    Contiki, another operation system for resource constrained low-power
%    systems. Below is a list of protocols I have worked with in TinyOS
%    and Contiki:

%   \emph{TinyOS:}
% \begin{itemize}
%   	\item Generic sensing interface, analogy/digital I/O, especially for TMote
%   Sky platform,

%   \item Networking protocols for low power communications in TinyOS. Including: \\
%   MAC protocols: B-MAC, X-MAC, RI-MAC, A-MAC, etc.; \\
%   Link quality estimators: ETX, RNP, 4Bit, STLE, F-LQE, LETX, HoPS, etc.; \\
%   Routing protocol: Collection Tree Protocol, Tymo (implementation of AODV) \\
%   Time synchronization: FTSP

%   \item Storage interface with practical experience for storing data in
%   TMote and MicaZ.
%   
%   \end{itemize}
% 
%  \emph{Contiki:}
%   \begin{itemize}
%   	\item Networking stacks, including ContikiMAC for TMote, Rime
%   	(low-power tree roting protocol), 6LoWPAN.
%   \end{itemize}


%\item \emph{Knowledge of PLC standards such as IEEE P1901.2, G3 or PRIME a plus}

%    As stated before, I believe I can learn the power line communication
%    standards quickly given my strong background and extensive
%    experience in low-power communication.

%\item \emph{Knowledge of wireless sensor networks a plus}

%More than 5 years of experience in wireless sensor networks as noted above.

%\item \emph{Excellent communication skills}

%My research group emphasizes independent research as well as
%collaboration among the researchers. Many of the projects I participated
%in are joint work by multiple students and sometimes external faculties.
%Therefore, inter-person communication skills are important through out
%my study in UC Merced, and I consider communicating with my co-workers
%is an inseparable part of my research.

%\end{itemize}

%\\
%I appreciate your taking the time to review my application.
%Again, thank you for your consideration.

%\vspace*{1em}
%\noindent
%With kind regards,

%\noindent Tao Liu

%\noindent Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

%\noindent School of Engineering

%\noindent University of California, Merced

%\noindent Email: \texttt{tliu@andes.ucmerced.edu}

%%\vspace*{2em}
%\noindent
%Encl:

%\begin{itemize}
%\item List of research projects
%\end{itemize}


%\newpage

\noindent
\underline{\textbf{List of Research Projects}}

\bigskip

\noindent Low-power Wireless Network Related Projects:

\begin{itemize}
	\item \noindent \emph{Novel wireless link quality estimators for
	low-power communication in power-constrained sensor networks.} This is
	my main research project. This project mainly
	involves designing and realization of novel link quality estimators
	with nesC in TinyOS, as well as the evaluate of the network
	performance in large scale wireless sensor network testbeds with more
	than 180 sensor nodes.
	
  Specifically, I designed and implemented wireless link quality
  estimators that predict short temporal quality variations of wireless
  links using logistic regression based models and efficient online
  learning algorithms. The models are data-driven and were implemented
  with efficiency in mind such that they can run sufficiently fast in
  the resource constrained sensor nodes. The implementation also
  includes modifications to almost all parts of existing networking
  stacks in TinyOS, from physical/MAC layer (X-MAC) to the routing
  protocol(CTP). For this project, I published three papers in SECON
  '09, IPSN '11 and SenSys '12 respectively. Please refer to the list of
  publications.
   
%   The hardware platform used in this project is MoteIV TMote Sky. TMote
%   is a widely used wireless sensor equipped with Texas Instruments
%   MSP430 F1611 micro-controller, ChipCon CC2420 (now TI) IEEE 802.15.4
%   compliant radio chip, 16-pin expansion, 10 KB of RAM and 48 KB of
%   ROM. TMotes are used in multiple projects as the sensing and
%   networking platform.

  \item \noindent \emph{Ultra low duty-cycle data forwarding protocol
  with synchronized opportunistic routing for duty-cycled low power
  sensor networks.} Opportunistic routing is an emerging routing
  technique that allows multiple recipient nodes to efficiently forward
  a batch of packets in a collaborative fashion. However, it is often
  difficult to employ opportunistic routing techniques in duty-cycled,
  low-power wireless sensor networks because the potential recipient
  nodes may be duty-cycled and cannot participate in packet forwarding.
  In this project I designed and implemented a cross-layer data
  forwarding scheme named SAF which applies opportunistic routing
  techniques and trades off latency for a significant increase in data
  transmission efficiency with low duty cycle. SAF employs hop by hop
  packet buffering to shape the data traffic, such that the sender nodes
  can send the packets with an adaptive sender-driven transmission
  schedule with efficient batch packet transmissions. The combiation of
  the transmission schedule and the batch tranmissions allows
  synchronization between the sender and multiple forwarding nodes, as
  well as opportunistic anypath routing which coordinates packet
  forwarding among multiple nodes by the use of bitmap acknowledgements.
  %
  Emprical results show that compared with state-of-art routing
  protocols, SAF is able to reduce the data transmission energy
  consumption by more than 10 times, and lower the overall average
  duty-cycle of the network by more than 71 percent by increasing the
  end to end latency 7.6 times on average. A paper is submitted to
  SenSys '13 and is currently under review.

  \item \noindent \emph{ Short-term solar energy forecasting using
  wireless sensor networks.} My involvement in this project is to
  develop the sensing and networking components for the TMotes such that
  they can interface with the custom-made solar irrandiance sensors, and
  deliver the collected data to the basestation with an ad-hoc wireless
  network. The program is developed in TinyOS using nesC. A paper is
  submitted to SenSys '13 and a poster is presented in 2013 UC Solar
  Research Symposium.

   
  \item \noindent \emph{ Solar irradiance measuring with low-cost sensor
  networks. } The goal of this project to design alternative ways to
  accurately measure the solar irradiance with low-cost, off-the-shelf
  sensors. I helped design a dome-shaped sensor cluster with 206 solar
  irradiance sensors to measure the Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI)
  as well as Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI). The sensing platform is
  Arduino Mega with ATmega1280 micro-controller. I developed the software
  components for the Arduino (using C and the Arduino development IDE)
  that collect data from the 206 solar irradiance sensors controlled by
  13 multiplexers.


% \item \noindent \emph{Distributed database management system for resource-constrained
%   sensors.} The goal of this on-going project is to design and implement
%   a distributed database system that runs on each sensor of a ad-hoc
%   sensor network. The sensors are connected to one or more
%   basestation(s) in a tree-like routing structure such that queries
%   issued from the central basestation can be automatically distributed
%   to all the related sensors in the network. My responsibilities in
%   this project is to modify the existing Rime networking stack in
%   Contiki such that the routing structure information can be embedded
%   in the query results from individual sensor nodes. The operation
%   system used in this project is Contiki,  a relatively new OS for
%   low-power devices, and my implementation is being tested in Cooja
%   (network simulator in Contiki) as well as TMotes.


  \item \noindent \emph{ Object position estimation with TMote and
  Cyclopes camera board.} This project involves building a distributed
  object position estimation system with Cyclopes camera boards using
  nesC and TinyOS. Cyclopes is a low-power camera board powered by a
  ATMEL ATmega128L MCU, and in this project we pair the Tmote with the
  Cyclopes broad to capture the movement of people. I helped the
  developement of the data storage module using nesC which stores the
  captured images locally in the Cyclopes, and set up the tree routing
  protocol in TinyOS to transmit the data to the basestation in an
  ad-hoc manner. The hardware platform was upgraded to iMote2 with
  IMB400 camera later.
  

%\item \noindent \emph{ Occupancy measurement with iMote2 with IMB400 camera.} This project is
%   a continuation of the previous work and a part of bigger project of
%   real-time occupancy monitoring for energy efficient buildings. iMote2
%   is a sensor platform developed by Intel Research, which is equipped
%   with a PXA271 XScale processor and CC2420 radio. My responsibilities
%   in this project is to migrate the networking module designed for
%   TMote to the iMote2 platform.
%   
%   As a further upgrade to the camera sensor network, another embedded
%   platform, mbed, is being tested. I developed a small C library for
%   the mbed NXP LPC1768 (equipped with Cortex-M3 Core) which enables
%   it to take photos from TTL serial cameras with a regular interval and
%   send the photo via the USB serial interface.


  \item \noindent \emph{ Witness assisted lost object tracking system
  that uses MicaZ with MTS420CC GPS board.} MicaZ is an ultra-low-power
  sensor nodes equipped with Atmel ATmega128L micro-controller and IEEE
  802.15.4 compliant RF transceiver, and MTS420CC a low-power sensor
  board with uBlox GPS module. My responsibilities in this project is to
  develop TinyOS program for GPS data gathering, storage and reliable
  data exchange in a delay tolerant network. The related paper is
  published in ADHOCNOW '09.


%\item \noindent \emph{ Exercise physiology monitoring and modeling using Intel WISP sensing
%   platform.} WISP is a wireless, battery-free, RFID-based platform that
%   is capable of sensing and computation due to the on-board
%   ultra-low-power MSP430F2132 micro-controller. In this project, WISP
%   sensors were used to measure foot pronation (the angle of the foot
%   when it hits the ground) with its 3D accelerometer. My involvement
%   in this project is to develop a C library to gather the accelerometer
%   readings using the IAR Embedded Workbench for MSP430.
   

\end{itemize}

\noindent
Networking Related Projects:

\begin{itemize}

\item \noindent \emph{USB/IP for a local wireless sensor network
testbed.} USB/IP is an open source project that creates a general USB
device sharing system over IP network. It encapsulates USB I/O messages
into TCP payloads and transmits them between computers such that local
users can access remote USB devices as if they are locally attached. My
lab mate and me modified the USB/IP source code for the local wireless
sensor network testbed with more than 50 TMotes. My responsibility in
this project is to implement the network module that uses socket in Unix
environment to create TCP connections for the USB messages.

\item \noindent \emph{Protocol analysis with tcpdump for BACNet.} This
project is to understand the underlying network protocol (BACNet) used
in an office building in the campus, such that we can monitor and
control the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems of
that building to optimize its energy usage. I used tcpdump to sniff the
IP packets from the BACNet that control the building, and inferred the
access points (equivalent of host in Ethernet) we interested in. Based
on the information inferred from the packets, I also helped in creating
a Python script that periodically queries the access points with SOAP.

\end{itemize}

\end{document}
